BitTorrent has new plan to shape up P2P behavior

BitTorrent and Israeli content delivery firm Oversi have joined forces to make …

BitTorrent—what's left of the company, at least—announced a deal with Israeli content delivery firm Oversi to reduce the demand that P2P applications place on networks. The plan, which is meant to complement similar work from the P4P working group and IETF, "intelligently" directs BitTorrent requests to the best peers.

The continuing efforts in this area from both P2P developers and ISPs like Comcast are an encouraging sign that detente can be reached in the P2P wars, at least when it comes to bandwidth concerns. Both P4P and the new Oversi announcement claim to boost download speeds for users while reducing the (expensive) traffic that leaves an ISP's own network to traverse the Internet.

The current arrangement uses new Policy Discover Protocols from BitTorrent in order to query ISP capabilities and network architecture information. The information is shared with Oversi's NetEnhancer box, which is designed to "improve peer selection" in a way that's appropriate to the ISP in question, usually by directing requests to local network peers first.

P4P uses the same approach, relying on ISP-deployed "iTrackers" to provide this kind of information to local P2P clients. The benefits aren't just theoretical; Comcast recently announced the results of a real-world P4P trial in which it saw better performance, far less traffic leaving the network, and no significant increase in upload congestion (a serious worry, especially for cable ISPs).

Directing P2P downloads to local peers may boost download speeds and reduce traffic at a network transit point, but the worry has always been that it would substantially increase uploads within the network. Comcast found that, because so many people were uploading regardless of what Comcast did, directing P2P requests to local machines had little overall effect.

Oversi also markets P2P caching solutions, though they don't appear to be a part of the recent BitTorrent partnership, meant to address this issue. By storing the most commonly-requested P2P files on local cache points around the network and serving them up to customers from the cache, the boxes can allegedly free up upload capacity from other users on the local network who might have ended up provided parts of the file themselves.

Given Comcast's findings about the sheer amount of upload activity on its network, though, freeing up local uploaders might simply make their bandwidth available to serve other requests, many of which would originate off-network. Both P4P and Oversi/BitTorrent seem to have moved away from the widespread reliance on the caching approach, accepting that uploads are going to happen and the best way for an ISP to deal with them is simply to keep as much traffic as possible within the network.

BitTorrent, which is also involved with the P4P group, wants to be see less as a renegade than as a good Internet citizen. During the Comcast/P2P throttling case before the FCC, the company also announced an agreement with Comcast on issues related to handling P2P traffic fairly. As CEO Eric Klinker said about the Oversi announcement, "We believe that cooperative endeavors like this offer the most promising opportunities for helping the Internet to evolve.”

But what about the crush of traffic from new HTTP streaming sites, including Hulu, iPlayer, YouTube, and many more? Though both P2P solutions are targeted at video content, neither appears able to do anything for the legitimate streaming sites.